Recently, a low priced RGB-D sensor or camera such as Kinect by Microsoft is generally used. Therefore, a method (monocular camera tracking) which tracks a movement of the camera in real time using a monocular camera by a SFM (structure from motion) or a monocular SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) method which uses the above-mentioned sensor is actively being studied.
Recently, an algorithm called KinectFusion which three-dimensionally reconstructs an indoor environment in real time while a user moves with a Kinect camera has been announced. One of restrictive conditions of this method is that the reconstruction is performed only on an area determined before driving a system. Generally, the reconstruction is performed on a medium size room. The KinectFusion method represents an area to be reconstructed as volume data which is known as a TSDF (truncated signed distance function) and the volume data stores a distance to a close surface.
The KinectFusion method is used only for adjacent data in each step of the algorithm. However, the KinectFusion method reconstructs only an area determined before driving the system so that there is a limitation to expand a range of an area to be reconstructed.